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»Forget politics, don't read the papers, don't go online, deny them your voice« - thus begins the 'Leftist March', a chapter of Serhiy Zhadan's second prose volume Anarchy in the UKR, the motto of which is derived from a song by the Sex Pistols.

Zhadan is becoming one of the strongest voices of the young Ukrainian literature - and, at the same time, the antipode of Juri Andruchowytsch. Zhadan's first-person narrator, too, is constantly on the move: on trains or through bizarre landscapes. Yet he is not drawn towards the ruins of the Habsburg past, but towards the industrial wasteland of the Donbass in the country's southeast, the places of the anarcho-communism that was shattered by the Sowjets. Nobody there seems to recall Nestor Machno. Anarchism? That never existed. That is, until it rises again in November 2004 in Charkiv, from the feet of the »Fuck-Lenin-Memorial«.